1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a transport stream recording device, method thereof, transport stream reproduction device, method thereof, a program recording medium and a data recording medium and relates in particular to a transport stream recording device, method thereof, transport stream reproduction device, method thereof, a program recording medium and a data recording medium ideal for efficient record or reproduction of digital multi-channel broadcast signals transmitted as transport streams onto a data recording medium.
2. Description of Related Art
In Europe and North America, as well as domestically in Japan, MPEG2 (Moving Picture Experts Group Phase 2) transport streams are utilized in digital satellite broadcasts and land digital broadcasts, etc. MPEG video packets and MPEG audio packets for the audio and video of the broadcast program are time-multiplexed on these transport streams. The length of one transport stream packet is 188 bytes.
If the transport stream corresponding to the program could be recorded as digital signals on the receive side, then a high quality audiovisual program can be viewed repeatedly at any time with no degradation of image or sound quality.
If the transport stream of a the program could further be recorded for instance, on a recording medium capable of random access such as a hard disk or optical disk, then random access reproduction highly responsive to user commands can be achieved.
However, random accessible recording mediums such as hard disks and optical disks are usually formatted in logical block units of 2048 bytes called sectors and the data written in the sectors, based on an FAT (File Allocation Table) and UDF (Universal disk format), etc.
To achieve reproduction with high responsiveness, the AV (audio-visual) data contained in the transport stream must be recorded in sector units (or integer multiples of sector units). However, as mentioned above, the transport packet is 188 bytes, while the sector is 2048 bytes so that the sector and byte are therefore not well compatible with each other and the problem currently exists that AV data contained in the transport stream cannot be recorded in sector units (or integer multiples of sector units).
Further, even if the AV data could be recorded in sector units (or integer multiples of sector units), the high responsiveness of the random access reproduction makes address control of the recorded AV data difficult and troublesome to achieve.